Classical Values :: This is even worse than taxation without representation!

This is even worse than taxation without representation!

"Man Jailed Three Months for Breath Mint Possession."

I wish that I could say headlines like that were a joke, but no, it wasn't.

A man is suing the Kissimmee Police Department for an arrest over mints. When officers pulled Donald May over for an expired tag, they thought the mints he was chewing were crack and arrested him.

May told Eyewitness News they wouldn't let him out of jail for three months until tests proved the so-called drugs were candy...

May was pulled over for an expired tag on his car. When the officer walked up to him, he noticed something white in May's mouth. May said it was breath mints, but the officer thought it was crack cocaine.

That's a predictable result of laws which criminalize possession of things, because lots of things look like other things, and testing things takes time.

Interestingly, the officer claimed that the breath mints tested positive for cocaine on a "field test," but that the more accurate lab test confirmed that they were in fact breath mints.

According to Radley Balko, in these "field tests," lots of things test positive for substances other than what they are:

the Marijuana Policy Project announced the results of some lab testing they'd hired an expert to conduct on some of the more commonly used field tests, and found that patchouli, spearmint, and eucalyptus all tested positive for marijuana on one test kid, while an incredible 33 of 42 innocuous substances tested on another came back positive, including vanilla, anise, chicory, and peppermint.

I guess the remedy would be to sue the field test manufacturer, as the doctrine of sovereign immunity would protect the officer involved.

Another problem is that minute amounts of illicit substances are often present in legal substances. Poppy seeds contain trace amounts of opium, and 90% of ordinary U.S. currency is laced with cocaine. Which means you could technically possess something without knowing it.

I wish they'd at least treat drugs the way they once treated booze under Prohibition. For the most part, personal possession was legal, although there was no legal way to get alcohol, as buying, selling, and transferring were crimes. But if you really wanted to be legal, you could always go to a booze prescribing doctor, get a prescription like this, and have it filled at any booze-selling pharmacy:

While it was illegal to manufacture or distribute "beer, wine, or other intoxicating malt or vinous liquors" it was not illegal to possess it for personal use. The provision allowed Americans to possess alcohol in their homes and partake with family and guests as long as it stayed inside and was not distributed, traded or even given away to anyone outside the home.

Another interesting provision to prohibition was that alcohol was available via a physician's prescription. For centuries liquor had been used for medicinal purposes, in fact many of the liqueurs we know today were first developed as miracle cures for various ailments. Despite the fact that in 1916 whiskey and brandy were removed from The Pharmacopeia of the United States of America and in 1917 the American Medical Association stated that alcohol "...use in therapeutics as a tonic or stimulant or for food has no scientific value..." and voted in support of prohibition, there was still a belief in liquor's medicinal benefits among many.

Because of this established belief that liquor could cure and prevent a variety of ailments, doctors were still able to prescribe liquor to patients on a specially designed government prescription form that could be filled at any pharmacy.

That's more humane than the current approach to drugs, but any doctor today who prescribed drugs the way alcohol was once prescribed would find himself in jail.

How modern Americans put up with this stuff, I don't know.

(To think that King George couldn't even get away with taxing tea....)

HT, Nick Schweitzer.